Does Productive Mean Active? The Behavior of Occasional and Serial Academic Inventors in Patenting Processes

What is it about?

Making Masters of Many Trades Count…again_x000D_ _x000D_ It is no surprise that academic researchers are highly dependent on grants from both public and private institutions. In the assessment of researchers, if they should be given support or not, numbers count. Numbers of scientific publications and number of patents. In fact, the more prestigious the scientific article produced, the more money you may get. Teaching, mentoring and outreach are also examples of tasks that academic researchers should carry out. However, for successful grants, those activities tend to be given less consideration. _x000D_ At the same time, society looks to its universities with their brilliant minds and their start-ups to come up with new ideas to solve great challenges. We know that breakthroughs in science and medicine typically are the result of trial and error, interactions between experts and between doctors and their patients, and other activities. Should not that count?_x000D_ In our study, we interview twenty academic inventors about their patenting experience(s). Is a researcher that is named on 10 patent applications more inventive than another researcher, whose name only occurs in one patent application? Can we really ‘grade’ inventive contribution based on numeric output? These are some of the questions raised in our study. _x000D_

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